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To Keep Track of Reddit Conversations Around NYT Articles, We Built a Slack Bot
- ForHackernews 7y agoWait, Google doesn't support Perl?
- lallysingh 7y agoWho'd voluntarily do so in 2019?
- mfontani 7y agoThe NYT, surely - as they helped produce one of the best Perl profilers out there: https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf
- h3throw 7y agoI'm told that Amazon and Booking both have huge production Perl code bases so some major orgs still care about it
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lallysingh 7y agoGood point. There's probably good money in the "host all the stuff that's old and scary" business.
- Coffeewine 7y agoMy org is still writing new code in perl5. The degree to which it's unappealing is, in my opinion, greatly overstated.
- greglindahl 7y agoMost folks who like complaining about perl5 are doing so because they've worked with some terrible old codebase written in it. Terrible code is terrible code. But well-written perl5 code can be fun to work with.
- john-radio 7y agoI'm not much of a Perl user, but [its user community](https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/perl-not-dead-it-was-early-web-novices-gave-it-bad-name https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/perl-not-dead-it-was-...) is surprisingly strong and enthusiastic (even if they do talk about Python the way the TF2 community talks about Overwatch).
- lucb1e 7y agoThe relevant part of the article, for those like myself who read the comments first: > When I looked at the code, I realized I was not going to be able to reuse anything because it was written in Perl. My plan was to rely on many of Google’s managed services, which don’t support Perl. I didn't know Google did shared hosting these days (like, PHP or whatever they do support, I knew about VPSes and hosted databases).
- scarejunba 7y agoConsidering they said 'managed services' you can guess that they use Cloud Functions, App Engine or something like that. With Google Cloud Run you could easily do what they wanted, but then you have to have the Docker tooling. Of course if they were using GCE, GKE, or any other way to deploy compute they'd be fine. In this case, because they're using GAE, they have limited language support without doing lots of (to them) complex stuff. It's the right decision to port here.
- gipp 7y agoI used to work at the times, they definitely have the docker tooling. Most production stuff runs on GKE. The author of the article has a long-standing affinity for GAE, though, plus it's just a quick maker week project so GAE still makes more sense.
- lallysingh 7y agoThe article's actual title is "To Keep Track of Reddit Conversations Around New York Times Articles, We Built a Slack Bot." There's some strong editorializing in this post's title.
- baud147258 7y agoThe actual title is too long for the HN submission. But I agree that the editorializing is poor; a better title would have been: NY Times tracks Reddit conversations around their articles using a Slack bot
- GCA10 7y agoThere's always a shorter way to get key elements into a headline. How about: To Track Reddit's Take on NYT Articles, We Built a Slack Bot
- hombre_fatal 7y agoAt that point, what's the point of the Yoda sentence split-and-reorder? How about: {We/NYTimes} Built a Slack Bot to Track Reddit's Take on NYT Articles
- dictum 7y agoI'm not privy to the technical reasoning, but the Yoda split-and-reorder is part of their brand identity, so to speak. It's an in-joke in journalism that the NYT routinely starts headlines with prepositions (followed by "location/context, noun/subject verb noun...")
- dictum 7y agoMy take would be "In the NYT Slack, a Bot to Track Reddit Conversations". https://twitter.com/NYTPrepositions https://twitter.com/NYTPrepositions
- sctb 7y agoThanks, we've updated the title from “NYT Tracks Reddit Conversations Around nytimes.com Content” to that of the article with a more mechanical shortening.
- whack 7y agoIt's interesting how "NYT tracks Reddit conversations" sounds so much less malevolent when you know exactly what they are doing and why. Ie, posting slack links of public Reddit threads so the article authors can see and participate in the resulting discussion.
- Raphmedia 7y agoYou can already simply click a domain on reddit and it shows you all the posts that linked it.
- john-radio 7y ago...I've been on reddit over 10 years and never noticed that.
- Raphmedia 7y agoFor example, https://www.reddit.com/domain/ycombinator.com/ https://www.reddit.com/domain/ycombinator.com/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 7y agoEven the editorialized title doesn't sound all that negative. Editorial teams reading public forums to see how their articles are being interpreted and discussed sounds pretty normal.
- ImprovedSilence 7y agoI would wager they are doing the same thing for HN. Also of note, ever since I started coming back here for the first time in several years, I couldn’t help but notice the high percentage of NYT articles posted here. I’m not saying they don’t fit the HN mold/interest bucket, but I was just surprised to see so many headlines from them here, on HN, so regularly. I think NYT is playing a strong grassroots/AstroTurf/social media game.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThey probably have a bunch of sites they do this to. Each time someone discovers a new one they probably create another config for that site and then whenever a link is posted the bot spams the channel with "hey, $author's article about $title" is being discussed on $site at $link2comments".
- Causality1 7y agoHN punches above its weight class when it comes to influence so it's unsurprising the NYT wants to keep their visibility here high.
- scarejunba 7y agoAbout 90% of the time when some group of people claim they have influence they have fuck-all influence. Reminds me of the time some 4chan users tried to have ReCaptcha label things 'penis' because they had this inflated sense of influence. ReCaptcha said that it was trivial to handle the increased traffic and that it was not only auto-filtered out but also a drop in the bucket. Everyone always thinks they're hot shit. But the world is a big place.
- duxup 7y agoI remember when folks felt stupid spats on slashdot mattered. It didn't.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- duxup 7y agoUnderstanding the response to your work seems logical, in every field. Also hello NYT slack!
- larkeith 7y agoGood on them! Being able to view responses to their content is ideal for both the publisher and the readers, this seems like it's the internet working at its best. I wonder how viable this might be as a service? Side note: The current title ("NYT Tracks Reddit Conversations Around nytimes.com Content") is quite editorialized, and somewhat misleading.
- tylerpachal 7y agoSangria is an excellent GraphQL library for Scala! Very sadly Oleg Ilyenko, the maintainer, passed away recently[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/etorreborre/status/1126921902386184195?s=21 https://twitter.com/etorreborre/status/1126921902386184195?s...